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Abstract
This article focuses on the controversy surrounding bell hooks and Lemonade to contend with the neoliberal constraints of digital, feminist, public intellectual argumentation. I argue that hooks’s critique reveals her killjoy rhetorical style. Drawn from Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the feminist killjoy, hooks’s killjoy style provides a rhetorical interruption that reshapes the affective orientations of feminist communities. Its snappy affect opens up the potentiality for critical feminist theory amid the challenges of neoliberalism.
Notes
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Women’s Studies in Communication’s two anonymous reviewers and editor Claire Sisco King for their generative feedback. He would also like to express his gratitude to the crowd of feminist killjoys who reviewed this article from its genesis to its submission: Tolu Taiwo, Jennifer Smith, Anna M. Young, Lisa Marcus, Michael Diambri, Breanna Wiersma, Arthur Strum, Carly S. Woods, Catherine Knight Steele, Aya Farhat, Sarah Spech, and especially Damien S. Pfister and Shawn J. Parry-Giles.
Notes
1 By the Black blogosphere, I mean the collection of Black bloggers whose criticisms circulate together. This follows the work of scholars of Black women’s online discourse (see Brock et al.; Steele).
2 These posts—and many of the other blog posts I mentioned—are evidenced as circulating together by lists compiled at Buzzfeed (Giorgis) and the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog, Black Perspectives (Johnson and Hobson).
3 I am indebted to the work of hooks (Feminist Theory) for this term, which I use throughout the article. I use neoliberalism as a more specific, contemporary conceptualization of capitalism.
4 I am a white man. Recognizing how my gender and race privilege me in academic spaces, I wish to be careful about what a scholarly contribution in these conversations looks like. This project is driven by a desire to uplift the project of Black feminism and the voices of Black women, and to explore their participation in the networked public sphere in a new way. The goal is not to provide an answer about the “best” way to do something. I hope, instead, to show that rhetorical style is something worthy of adding to the feminist toolkit. It is a tool capable of generating more inquiry about how academics and our ideas enter the public sphere.
5 I am being intentional in following Barbara Tomlinson’s use of the term “scene of the argument” to emphasize the structures of argument—for example, topoi, enthymemes, tropes—not the arguers (Tomlinson 995).
6 Sara Ahmed writes, “It is not that an individual person suffers from false consciousness but that we inherit a certain false consciousness when we learn to see and not to see things in a certain way” (“Killing Joy” 590).
7 Their stories are detailed in foundational texts on Black feminism and Black feminist history (see Guy-Sheftall; Collins; Royster; Bay et al.; Cooper).
8 This is not to understand Black feminist rhetoric as “monolithic” but rather to recognize Black feminist intellectuals do “specific kinds of work in the name of black feminism” because of related constraints and commitments (Smith xix).
9 Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn argue that styles can “enact the type of political reasoning” the rhetor “proposes” (300). In their case, Ann Richards validates forms of reasoning typically discounted by masculinist political reasoning, like “testing claims with experience” (Dow and Tonn 289). I will show, in the case of bell hooks, that her style validates killjoy reasoning despite the duty to happiness.
10 Vivian notes, “Ethical consideration of a given communal style therefore amounts to asking if it either displays a capacity for producing a variety of responses to multiple social and political exigencies, or if it invokes a privileged sentiment merely to impose a dogmatic civic pathos on diverse cultural practices” (241).
11 As Olga Davis has pointed out, “a Black women scholar serves as a keeper of rhetorical culture by revealing the long standing diversity of ideals, culture, and aesthetics of black women’s intellectual tradition” (80–81). Collective knowledge building does not mean that there is no disagreement but that there is not the same epistemological emphasis on individual knowledge creation and ownership as seen in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
12 Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz aptly describes this shifting power. He explained that the queer strategy of identity known as disidentification operates on the understanding “that counterdiscourses, like discourse, can always fluctuate for different ideological ends, and a politicized agent must have the ability to adapt and shift as quickly as power does within discourse” (18–19).
13 Readers will likely recognize this as intersectionality. I seek to follow Kimberlé Crenshaw’s commitment, furthered by scholars like Vivian M. May, in “identifying intersectionality as a concept with an under-recognized history in a tradition oriented toward social change” by referencing the work of Black women intellectuals like Truth and Anna Julia Cooper that “intersectionality seeks to render perceptible” (May 97). Using the precursors to intersectional theory helps show how hooks follows a long tradition of Black feminist intellectuals. It also helps preserve the conceptual richness of their ideas—as the term intersectionality has begun to take on meanings that the concept does not (see May 107).
14 For sustained discussion of Truth’s famous essay in a Black feminist context, see Collins 17–18. It is also worth noting that rhetorical scholars have questioned the accuracy of this speech text (see Mandziuk and Fitch).
15 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley agrees with hooks, noting that she saw “something that wasn’t simple autobiography” in Lemonade (24).
16 Ahmed refers to “white men as a cumulative effect” instead of “persons who share a common attribute”; it is the structural logic that creates “men,” not the people that this logic implicates (Living a Feminist Life 270, note 8).
17 This was a praise of Lemonade that echoed throughout the Black blogosphere. At Black Girl Nerds, Jazmine Joyner says, “Beyonce took something that was deeply personal and bared her insecurities, threw herself into her art and made something truly beautiful.” Writing in The Guardian, Ijeoma Oluo praised the “amazing love-filled gift Beyoncé has given us all,” where “us” refers to the author and “many other black women” she knows who will use Lemonade to “get through some of the dark days to come.”